Writing 200 Blog Post 10 - Sharing

Prompt: Write about your experiences of sharing your written work with others. Have you been in a writing group before? Would you deem that experience a success—or not? Under what conditions is sharing your writing with others a positive experience? When has sharing your writing with others proved to be miserable—and what made it so?

I've never been in a writing group before, and I haven't shared my work with many people. However, I have had a few experiences in this realm that left me neither miserable nor dying to get my work out into the world. As I've said in a few previous blog posts for this class, I write mostly as a creative outlet for myself, not to share my work with others.

I have submitted a few pieces I thought were great to magazines and contests—I did that a few times in high school, I should say. Looking back on what I thought was my best work, it's clear to me why the work was rejected. They're serviceable, for the most part, but nothing as special as I thought they were. Especially looking back on the poetry I wrote as a freshman in high school, I'm part embarrassed and part amused. That experience may have made me a bit more cautious about sharing my work in that way, but I was never very inclined to anyways. It's certainly made me more critical of my own writing, or at least more skeptical when I think I've got something profound down on paper—I know that in a few years. might look back on it and cringe.

That said, I have had some positive experiences sharing my work with family or close friends, and I always enjoy receiving peer editing on my academic work. It's sometimes difficult for me to accept the flaws in my writing, but that's something I've worked on a lot over the years and I think I've gotten much better at taking constructive criticism. One reason is that I've come to understand the importance of the rhetorical situation, particularly the role of the audience. I can have an amazing idea and amazing writing, but if that idea isn't conveyed to real people through the writing, neither of them is doing much good.

Overall, I'm happy keeping my writing to myself. In a way, it proves to me that I can create something I enjoy without seeking praise for it. But when I do choose to share it (or when I'm required to), it's usually a positive experience that makes me understand how to make myself more clearly understood.